Feigning Normality
by chrissie0707
Summary: Response to my own challenge to write the CSIs as superheroes. They aren't NORMAL. Not anymore.


**a/n **I'm posting this tonight, because I'm afraid if I wait until tomorrow, I'll end up rewriting the whole thing. When I first had the idea for this challenge, I thought it was going to be good for a laugh. As you can see from some of the other responses, and from my own, there turned out to be other routes to take. So here, presented to you without page breaks (grr), is my response, which is more on the serious side than the lighter side, and something that I think is way different from anything else I've written. 

Everyone involved can have their cookie now!

Slackers unite!

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**Feigning Normality **

-My response to my own genius (insert gutteral roar of frustration) challenge idea to make the CSIs superheroes. Mine is supposed to have a crispy Season Two crust.

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The next day, there were a lot of "experts" in suits and fancy biohazard outfits running around Las Vegas with lots of paperwork and fancy clicking gadgets, but there was no explanation for what had happened. At least not one that he could understand. Nick was an educated man, and a scientist, but he'd be damned if he had any idea what the jackass suit in front of him was saying. It all sounded like white noise. It was probably the concussion.

Something about some new hoity toity – maybe that was just Nick's interpretation of the man's words – machine in the DNA lab, and an explosion…and then Nick remembered. The whole night came rushing back in a bright white flash, overloading all of his senses with smells, sounds, sights, and a hot hot hot furnace blast of air that had singed his skin and knocked him flat on his ass.

He hadn't been the only one. There had been others there in the DNA lab. They had been working a case. His team. His friends. Nick tuned out the words of the man that he already wasn't listening to and sat up quickly. Too quickly, he realized, as his skull threatened to crack open and let his brain slide out in a slippery goo. His brain felt…overheated. Nick winced, placing a hand firmly against his throbbing temple, and started to look around the hospital room frantically. If he was there, then the others were going to be there, too? Right?

When he started to get out of the bed, ignoring the pull of the IV in his hand, there was someone at his side in an instant, so quickly that they had to have been in the room already and just escaped Nick's panicked notice.

"Nicky, lay back down. They're worried about your head."

_Grissom. _So he was okay. And here. Nick looked up at him with a hundred questions in his eyes. Grissom looked disheveled, graying hairs sticking up and out of place, and he opened his mouth, but could only shake his head.

Nick squinted, and stared at him, and for a fraction of a second, it was almost like he knew exactly what the man was feeling.

Nothing.

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One year later…

He started every day the same.

Just like he used to – with a run. It wasn't that he needed the exercise anymore – any effort on his part to stay in shape was a thing of the past, he hadn't gained or lost a single pound in the last year – it was just that running kept him grounded, and sane.

It was ordinary.

It was NORMAL.

It was plain, and regular, like a bowl of instant oatmeal. It was beige. But most importantly, it was normal, the only normal thing left in his life besides sleeping. Everybody ran these days. A mile in the morning, five miles after work – everyone was on a health kick it seemed. Well, maybe he wasn't on a health kick like everyone else in the country, and maybe there was something amiss when said run stretched on for twenty or thirty miles, but it still made him feel normal.

Something had to.

He wasn't above setting limits for himself, but he usually ran and ran and didn't stop until he noticed the neighbors watching him. Especially that old bat down the street, she always seemed to be keeping a sharp eye out for the weirdo who dead ran past her house fifteen or more times every morning. He couldn't actually read her thoughts – that was Catherine's department – but he still got a vibe of off her. Not a pleasant one. Sometimes, it felt like she KNEW. But she couldn't; no one outside the department did – and all the right people had been very careful about making sure it stayed that way.

She wasn't the only one. There were others. The Pruetts, that nice older couple that lived next door – they had started looking at him differently. Maybe it was all in his head, but when he noticed them staring, then he decided it was time to stop, and head home. They probably thought he was some kind of roided up freak, or training for the Olympics.

He was so much more.

Nick only made seventeen laps around the neighborhood that morning before he noticed Mrs. Davis had set up shop in that creaky rocking chair on her front porch, and he could read the scrutiny and full on 'what-the-hell?' in her squinted blue eyes from the street. Couldn't she just get a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart and leave him alone?

He slowed his pace, feigned a cramp in his side, and raised a hand in greeting. "Morning, Mrs. Davis."

The old woman jumped as though surprised that he spotted her tucked away in the secretive confines of her _wide open_ front porch, but recovered quickly and regained that dignified and better-than-you posture that she carried herself with. She squinted further and waved a wrinkled hand dismissively in his direction, muttering under her breath. The vibe grew stronger, and it started to feel like every other monster headache he got when this happened. Yep, she thought he was a freak.

And really, wasn't he?

Weren't they all?

He wasn't handling it very well, when he took the time to think about it. So mostly, he just didn't take the time to think about it. It just made him feel crazy, because Nick had always been a very logical person, and NOTHING about this was logical.

It had been a year. Today, in fact. As Nick rounded the corner into his driveway at what he considered a brisk jog – and what others (_normal _people) might consider sprinting – he idly wondered if anyone would say anything. Bring it up. Maybe bake an anniversary cake. Because mostly, they just didn't talk about the night that they had gone from a crack team of crime-solving scientists to a misfit group of crime…stopping?preventing?fighting?…whatever they were. And even if they did talk about it, Nick still wasn't sure that he would understand what had happened.

It had been decided very early on by the city's higher ups that the whole thing would be kept on the DL, so to speak. Faulty wiring, mechanical overload, whatever excuses were begging to be made, no one wanted to take the blame for what had happened to them. The PD certainly didn't complain. Crime rates had plummeted over the past twelve months, and they all got to spend a lot of extra time sitting on their asses behind desks, soaking up all of the credit, looking on with a mixture of fear, admiration, and sympathy as one of them passed by. It seemed like the fear was always there, and Nick, of course, could tell.

Brass was different. Of _course _Brass was different. He was Brass. It would have been another lightning bolt jolt to the central nervous system and straight up the brainstem if he had started looking at them like everyone else did. He didn't understand, obviously, because no one but them really could…but he tried. In a way that no one else did. He spent as much time with them as he could, and he served as comic relief to an incredibly shitty situation.

The same went for Greg. It had been the kid's lucky day that he had had the flu that night, and hadn't been in the lab, or the same thing – whatever it was – would have happened to him, too. Maybe worse. His fill-in hadn't fared very well, being in such close proximity to the machine when it went wonky. He was still lying comatose in Desert Palms. Greg had stuck around, even after most of the lab employees had moved on to find a crime lab where they were actually needed. Whether out of friendship, loyalty, or guilt, Greg had stuck around, taking quite the pay cut, on the off chance that some committed crime might slip through the cracks and they would be in need of the DNA lab and his services. A lot of the fancier equipment had been moved out long ago, but he still had enough to make do with the couple of cases a month that still required his expertise.

Las Vegas didn't need such a stacked crime lab anymore. The majority of crimes were stopped long before things got that far. The "Graveyard Shift" had long since been terminated. "Day Shift", "Swing Shift"…there were no shifts, there was just them. A handful of the more loyal lab techs, mostly to keep up appearances to the civilians, and them. No more Ecklie, praise be. He had found himself a job somewhere out East, and couldn't get outta Dodge fast enough. And none of the clueless dingbats that inhabited Las Vegas seemed to notice that their second busiest crime lab in the country had dwindled down to employing just over twenty people.

As for them…Gris, Catherine, Warrick, Sara, and Nick, himself, they had been faced with one hell of an about-face on the grand scale of human experience. As they were left with what seemed to the outside observer as limitless possibilities, there was really no question what they were going to do with these newfound…abilities. They would stick together. They had always worked best together, and if there was ever time when they needed each other, it was now.

Nick checked the time when he entered his home. Nine twenty-seven. He had run those seventeen laps in just over an hour. _Shit_. That just might raise some eyebrows, yeah. He would have to start toning it down a bit. Already feeling the beginnings of a bad day that wasn't going to get any better, he decided he might as well just grab a hot shower and head into "work". They didn't really go by a set schedule anymore, but it seemed that those that came in during the day had taken to coming in in the late morning hours. Again, it was that _normal_ thing. A few of them would come in the day, and a couple at night, so they had a kind of twenty-four hour revolving door of freak walking in and out of the crime lab.

While they still sometimes had a few cases come in for them from the PD, most times they just walked around the city, waiting for Grissom to hear something, or Catherine to read something that raised a red flag, or for Nick to feel something twitchy radiating off of someone. Sara and Warrick…well, what had happened to them was a little different.

It taken some getting used to not being able to see Warrick anymore. It made a game of one-on-one a bitch, too. It had been a hella long time since Nick had won a game. They still tried, but it was hard to keep the ball out of the reach of someone that you couldn't SEE. 'Rick joked about the whole thing; perverted girl's locker room type jokes that Nick could see through in a heartbeat. Literally. Warrick was hurting, they all were, and sometimes it got to the point that Nick couldn't be with all of them in the same room for an extended period of time, afraid that he just might actually overload.

No matter how many times they tried, there was no way for him to be in the same room with Sara for more than five minutes. It was hard for all of them, as they all felt what Sara did now, but being able to feel, sense, _whatever_ what others were feeling to the extent that Nick did – it was just too much to be around Sara. She was an emotional person to start with, and the explosion, the pulse, whatever those guys in suits wanted to call it – it had magnified her feelings a hundred times. To the point where they were actually scared for her, and of her, sometimes.

A few days after it had happened, Las Vegas had been hit with a sudden rainstorm. The biggest, heaviest, harshest rainstorm it ever had, out of nowhere, and there was a lot a fear that some of the city would be flooded. As soon as it had happened, Nick could feel her pain from his own house across town, and had gone to Sara's apartment to find her curled up on her couch, crying harder than he'd ever seen her cry before. He had calmed her down, pushing away the roaring and pounding and pulsing in his head, and the rain had slowed to a stop.

It had rained a lot in those first few months.

Now they could joke about it. Greg called her Storm, and she hardy har har'ed right along with the rest of them, but she wasn't anything…anyONE…that should be messed with. Things tended to explode or catch fire when she was angry, so they did their best to keep her as happy as they could, although Nick could really only lend her support in passing. It was starting to hurt less to be around her, like he was actually getting _used_ to this, but he'd rather not chance his head exploding from the pressure it was under.

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After a relatively peaceful drive (no one seemed to be having any murderous feelings at the moment), Nick walked into the building formerly known as the Las Vegas Crime Lab and shook his head at the near-deserted halls. Only a year ago, those same halls would been filled with an every day twenty four-seven hustle bo bustle endless stream of people. In the air, there would tension – but the good kind, these were people who really cooked under pressure – and knowledge, and facts, and data, and evidence, and chattering. Now, there was silence in the outside, and a constant buzzing in the inside of more than one of their heads.

Nick instantly knew that Sara was in the building, and that it seemed to be one of her good days. He might even be able to have a longer conversation with her that afternoon, after he had enough time to try and dull the throbbing that her presence caused him.

Even after a year, he still went straight to the break room upon entering the building, like he was coming on for shift or something. As soon as he entered the seemingly empty room, and saw it, he had a sudden longing to flop onto the couch and wait with his friends for that night's assignments. _So it's going to be on of THOSE kinds of anniversaries. _

With a 'why the hell not' kind of shrug, he did just that. Nick stretched, leaned back against the comfy fabric and closed his eyes, almost wishing the old couch could just swallow him whole as he felt Sara's presence start to fade away. She had obviously left the building, and Nick had no doubt that it was because he was there. He never had any trouble picking up on her guilt over what her exaggerated feelings did to him.

Before he could fall into too much of a funk, Nick felt something land on his stomach and let out a surprised 'oof.' He cracked open an eye and glanced down, smiling at the Playstation controller that had been tossed onto him. They had of course kept the game system. Here again, it was normal, and Nick liked things that fell into that category.

"I knew you were there," Nick said.

A deep baritone chuckle sounded to his right. "Yeah, I bet."

Nick sat up and glanced over. This still creeped him out a little. "What do you wanna play?" he asked the floating controller next to him.

Warrick clicked his tongue, and for a split-second, Nick could almost see his friend roll those green eyes. "What do you think?"

"Cowboys," Nick called.

"No shit. Really?" Warrick responded sarcastically, and the joystick on the floating controller started to move, and the buttons to depress themselves as Warrick went through the motions of setting up the football game. Nick couldn't help himself, and he stared.

He felt Warrick start to get agitated before the other man said anything. "Sorry," he said, tearing his eyes away and refocusing them on the television screen.

"Don't worry about it." They went through this at some point almost every day.

Nick shifted his shoulders and hit the appropriate buttons to chose his beloved Cowboys as his team to play with. _It's gonna be one long-ass day,_ he thought.

As if on cue, Catherine appeared in the door. She stopped and cocked her head as Nick looked up at her.

He sighed. "It's nothing, Cath," he said, before she got the chance to say anything. She could really only pick up thoughts within a certain range, something that made Nick extremely jealous, and he usually tried to keep himself well out of that range. He had enough inner turmoil over the way he unwillingly violated others' privacy without throwing in the violation of his own mind. Not that she could help it.

Catherine gave him a small, tired smile, and sat at the table in the middle of the room, giving a small wave at the controller jiggling in the open air next to Nick. "Is anyone else coming in today?"

Nick shrugged, but he guessed that Catherine didn't see it, because she raised her eyebrows. "Hello?"

"I shrugged," Nick said, not looking up from the screen.

"So did I, if that makes you feel any better," Warrick said.

Catherine smiled. "It kind of does."

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No one else came in that day, and Nick wasn't surprised that the two they were missing were Sara and Gris. Grissom, a lifelong people-watcher, was really the only one of them that saw his new abilities as a gift, and he spent more time sitting on the balcony of his apartment, just listening and taking in all of the sounds of the city than he did in the lab. On the days that he didn't come in, it was normal to get at least one call from the man that he had heard a fight going on over in Henderson and they better have Brass get an officer over there to check it out, or other things like that. Sometimes he could even give them the exact address. Grissom was having a ball.

Too bad he was the only one.

Nick had the feeling – not literally, just a regular old hunch – that Grissom and Sara were together. They spent a lot of time together, because he could be around her for as long as she needed someone to be there for her. Because there was more to Grissom than the magnified hearing…he seemed to be the only person immune to Sara's emotional assault on your insides. It stung others, ripped Nick apart, but Grissom…he didn't feel anything. Nick and Grissom were now literal polar opposites, and it made him sick – _not _figuratively speaking. Going from a constant chaotic barrage of others' feelings to NOTHING was a shock like no other to his system, and the effects ranged from a dizzying headache to a full-on rebellion on his body's part, forcing him to find someplace close to vomit.

He didn't spend too much time with Grissom.

Speak of the devil, he had called in the early afternoon to tell them that he had heard gunshots close by. Nick's hunch was dead on, the address he zeroed in on and gave them was only a few blocks from Sara's apartment. As the three of them, two to the outside observer, walked out of the building, Nick got an image in his head – of them in full superhero outfits, tights, capes, and all. _We're the Nerd Herd,_ he thought with a quiet chuckle.

Catherine started laughing, and Nick looked over at her questioningly before it hit him. Of course she had seen and heard what he had thought up, and he felt his cheeks burn red.

"No, Nicky," she said, catching her breath, "it's funny. That's the kind of thinking we need around here. None of this moping."

Nick grinned. "Can we rename the lab the 'Bat Cave'?"

As Catherine shook her head, letting out another laugh, Warrick's voice sounded as the back left door to the SUV opened. "I don't even wanna know."

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It hadn't necessarily been a _bad_ day, but it hadn't been a picnic, either. The gunshots turned out to be the work of a group of Snakebacks who thoughts they could still get away with shit like pumping a group of rival gang members full of lead. It took all of three minutes for Catherine and Nick to use their combined…ah, hell, they were POWERS, weren't they? Special powers. That they had and no one else did. They weren't ordinary, or regular, or NORMAL. They were special. And they used their speciality, their specialness, to track down the exact group, the EXACT shooter. And then they did what they do. They _were_ still CSIs, they just found the suspect a lot quicker than they used to.

They had found the shooter in the shittiest neighborhood imaginable, just Nick's luck, and it had been filled to the brim with all kinds of people enduring all kinds of angst on a daily basis. He had a lot easier time crossing paths with a happily married couple than a single mother raising four kids in the worst part of town and working more than one crap job. He had made some unnecessary excuses – they all knew how bad it could get – and headed home.

Nick made his way slowly up his driveway. No joking this time, he moved like an old man, weighed down by the things that he had felt that day.

He swallowed hard as he unlocked the door and entered the house, shutting and locking the door behind him, setting the alarm, going through the motions. As soon as he turned on the living room light, he couldn't take it anymore, and he slumped to the ground right there, leaning against his front door.

He covered his face with his hands in a futile attempt to keep it all in, to hold it all back. He was no match for the fury, love, hate, want, need, rage, sorrow, pity, greed that he had crossed paths with that day, and it all came pouring out of him in a hot rush of tears until he felt like there was finally enough room left inside of him for _him_.

He ended every day the same.

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End file.
